BenQ Joybee GP2 review

The Joybee 2 is a miniature LED projector with a built-in iPod dock, which is designed to be taken with you to show off your videos. It has a 1,280×800 resolution and 200 lumens brightness, and will take an input from a range of sources apart from iPods: there’s VGA, composite and USB video for connecting to a PC, component and HDMI for games consoles and Blu-ray and DVD players and finally an SD card slot and a USB port for external storage. There’s also 1.3GB of usable internal memory, and you can copy files to the projector from your PC over USB.

The GP2 comes with a carrying case with room for the power supply and cables, and weighs only 560g, so is ideal for travelling businessmen who can present with the lights off. Thanks to its internal memory, USB and SD card support and the built-in iPod dock, you don’t even need to take a laptop with you. An external battery pack (part code 5J.J3C01.001, £80 approx) should be available at the end of April, which BenQ claims will give you three hours of projection.

There’s a proprietary port for the bundled VGA/component adaptor cable, and the iPod dock sits on top. The GP2 has impressive file format support; it can officially play MJPEG, H.263 and XviD video in AVI, MOV and MP4 wrappers, plus Flash video, but we managed to play MPEG4, H.264 and MKV files as well. You can also view JPG, BMP and PNG images, and the popular OGG and FLAC music formats are supported along with MP3, AAC and WMA formats. The iPod dock is more limited; it will only let you play videos through the projector, and there’s no image support. The GP2 has backlit, touch-sensitive controls on its top surface, plus a credit-card-sized remote control with blister buttons. The player’s controls don’t give much feedback, whereas the remote prefers you use it on the left of the GP2, as that’s where the receiver is.

It’s an LED DLP projector, which means it uses red, green and blue LEDs to produce colour rather than a single white lamp and a spinning colour wheel. This not only eliminates the dreaded DLP rainbow effect – where flashes of primary colour are visible in fast-moving or black-and-white images – but reduces power consumption dramatically. The downside is that the lamps only produce 200 lumens brightness, which isn’t enough to view images under bright lighting.

The reasonably high resolution for such a small projector means you can use the Windows desktop without having to compress it into a smaller resolution, but the GP2 still suffers from inconsistent focus across the screen. There’s an auto-keystone control, but we didn’t notice it making much difference, so we switched it off, as keystone correction generally degrades the image. You also get wall colour correction – you select the approximate colour of your wall from a list, and the projector adjusts colour balance to compensate, helping image quality.

Despite this, colours weren’t very accurate, but their boldness made up for this to a certain extent. We noticed problems with skin tones from the start that the GP2’s colour temperature control didn’t fix, and you certainly wouldn’t use the GP2 to judge photos, but for watching movies it’s more than adequate. We had no problems viewing detail in dark scenes in Casino Royale, such as the folds in the black velvet dinner jacket worn by Le Chiffre.

Presentations are fine too, although if you’re using images you’d be advised to turn the lights down, as the projector’s limited brightness means your audience won’t see much detail. Charts and graphs were fine, however, and text was clear – you’ll be fine with high-contrast content, even under office lighting.

The GP2 is a versatile portable projector with reasonable image quality and a wealth of connections. If you don’t need the iPod dock there are cheaper alternatives, though; 3M’s PocketProjector MP180 and MicroVision’s Showwx+ HDMI should be on your shortlist depending on where you store your files and the type of content you want to project, while if you’re mainly going to project from a laptop’s VGA port the Asus P1 Pico Projector has better image quality than the GP2 and costs over £100 less.